[Dialogue] 10/20/16, Spong/Plumer: Bishop Spong and My Painting

Thu Oct 20 08:30:27 PDT 2016

     HOMEPAGE        MY PROFILE        ESSAY ARCHIVE       MESSAGE BOARDS       CALENDAR

Bishop Spong and My Painting
I am really not comfortable writing this article. There is a sense I am writing an obituary and nothing could be further from the truth. Bishop Spong is a beloved friend and he is apparently doing well in his recovery. I suppose I am a little nervous knowing that he will be reading what I write and we already have a history about this. For those who do not know, I am the President of ProgressiveChristianity.org. and we have been publishing Bishop Spong’s weekly articles for over six years now. About a two years ago I had dropped him a line indicating that his contract was running out and wondered what his plans were. Be assured, I wanted him to extend the contract but we needed to know. I do not remember exactly what I wrote but I may have written something like, “Jack, I know you are approaching your 85th birthday, but thought we should get this cleared up.”
I received a lovely note back but it started with, “Fred, every time you write you seem to remind me of my precarious mortality!” Then he went on to explain that he had two more ideas for books and wanted to keep writing the column for at least two more years. We have recently extended his contract for two more years.
I have been acquainted with Jack Spong for nearly twenty-five years. He was our first Honorary Advisor, and an early supporter of TCPC, now Progressive Christianity.org. In those early years when we were going to do a conference, we let the local church make all of the arrangements for speakers, contracts and facilities. TCPC would sponsor the event, which also meant we would pay for any losses.
We did not have a website then, but did have a mailing list of maybe a thousand people. We assumed the local church would do some promotion and our organization would advertise with our monthly newsletter. We never knew in advance how many people were going to show up. We assumed that the local people had the speakers lined up and contracts signed. And that was the situation when we arrived in Philadelphia for the all day Saturday event. Although we were worried that there would be no one there, it appeared to be a small but respectable gathering. I looked forward to hearing the three speakers and Bishop Spong was one.

Bishop Spong took the two speaking slots in the morning and the other two speakers were supposed to cover the afternoon. Spong’s talks were good and he finished up his second talk about time for lunch. However, during the break, I noticed the pastor of the church was having a serious conversation with Jim Adams, who was the president and founder of our organization at that time. I slipped to the back of the room and asked him if there was something wrong. Jim told me apparently the pastor of our co-sponsoring church never got back to the woman keynoter. She was supposed to do that last talk but she was not going to show up. She had made other arrangements. We had one local activist who was going to do something right after lunch and then it was time for the woman… the one who was not coming. We wondered if we would have to return some of the rather small fee we were charging. Could someone else in the room take that slot?
I followed Jim Adams over to the table where Jack Spong was sitting and we sat down. Jim explained our dilemma to Bishop Spong. He thought about it for about thirty seconds and then asked if he could have an hour to take a nap and collect his thoughts. Jim said certainly, and that is exactly what Bishop Spong did. No one complained and I might add, I thought it was his best talk.
That was the beginning of my appreciation for Jack Spong and what has become over the years, my sincere love for this man.
When I graduated from Seminary and few years before this incident, I had already dissolved my belief in the old paradigm of Jesus dying for our sins. Between the fact that I had attended a liberal seminary and my very early relationship with the Jesus Seminar, I really had little or no Christology left. As a pastor, I talked about the man, Jesus, who gave us many moral, ethical and spiritual lessons about how to live our lives. I knew he was a Jew and a Galilean, which was a minority of a minority. Yes, he was a special man and he had laid out a fairly simple way to live in harmony with self, with others, and with Abba, even in the most difficult times. But, like the great line in the famous musical, Jesus Christ Super Star, “he was just a man.”
But over the years Bishop Spong started filling in the blanks for me that gave both life and purpose to the Jesus I had studied for ten years at that point. Although I did not realize it at the time, I had a pretty one dimensional and no colors in my portrait of Jesus. I now realize what Bishop Spong provided for me is something like “a paint by the numbers” portrait of Jesus. As I read each of Jack’s books, I would fill in more of the painting, year after year. I read lots of other books, of course. I would guess in that twenty-five year period, I read three to four hundred books or more, many of which were helpful and some were great.
But it has been Bishop Spong’s books that gave my “portrait” color, depth, and life.

Each time he published a new book, I would paint a new portion of my painting. For example, after he published, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, (1992), I stopped skipping certain pages in the Bible or partially closing my eyes when I tried to read them. They began to take on new meaning when I put them in a new context. I began to read the Bible with a different perspective.
His earlier book, Living in Sin, (1990) helped me with some of the church’s attitudes and freed me to talk about some of the mores we were still living with. It was particularly helpful as we marched our church through the Open and Affirming process to publicly welcome the LGBT community into our church. A few years later he published Born of a Woman, (1994) that really rocked me. I had let the virgin birth thing go thirty years before I read this book. I almost did not buy the book, because I thought I knew all there was to know about that subject. I knew the history and the reasons the “virgin birth” had occurred. But I had not given any thought to how demeaning the whole concept was to women. I had not considered the negative impact it had on the women in the church and as a result in our society. I filled a lot of my space or numbers in my painting.
I could go on and explain how every book I read of Bishop Spong had some impact my understanding of Jesus and or Christianity as a whole. Okay, I did skip a few along the way. However, I would be remiss if I did not tell you about two books that really changed me, and if I may, changed “my painting.”
The book, Liberating the Gospels, (1996) probably had more of an impact on me and my understanding of scriptures than any of Spong’s other books. Yes, I knew that Jesus was a Jew. I knew that he was considered a rabbi by his followers. And in spite of the fact that my congregation shared our space, events, our meals and our teachings among other things with a Jewish congregation for fifteen years, I just had never read the Gospels like a Jew. We Christians or almost Christians are so arrogant. As I read this book a whole new understanding opened up. It was exciting and promising.
And finally, I probably would not have even read the book, except Jack called me to tell me among other things that he had instructed his publisher, HarperOne, that he wanted me to write an endorsement for his new book, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic (2014). There were few things about the Book of John that I liked. I knew it was written late. I knew what was going on when it was written. I knew that a lot of the second and third generation Christians/Jews were giving up on Jesus’ “eminent” return. I knew there was a split between the Christian Jews and the other Jews. I knew that there had been an uprising of some magnitude and the Romans retaliated with punishment.
I also knew that is had a lot of quotes in it that made no sense to a modern Christian or follower of Jesus… or they were contradictory to everything I believed about Jesus. So I just avoided it. I told Jack this and he said just read it and then decide. So in about week I received the publisher’s “uncorrected proof” copy of the book. They gave me two and a half weeks to read it. The book sat on my desk for the first week and I finally picked it up. I am guessing that most of you have now read it but I could not put it down. It made things that had never made sense, well, make sense. I have a much better understanding of what those early Christian Jews were going through and a clearer idea of how difficult it must have been for them as a group. I can now see how a more spiritual person, a mystic, might have approached his struggling faith. I know that some of the theories that Bishop Spong writes about are not proven and probably never will be, but the entire Book of John just seemed to take on a whole new meaning for me. His explanation that this was written by a Jewish mystic, or two, changed everything for me.
OK, I probably will not be lifting quotes from the Book of John for a sermon anytime in the near future. Nor will I pull out a quote to bolster some belief that Jesus was reborn or resuscitated after being killed. (Spong does attempt to give the Resurrection idea more emphasis than I would have in his book, The Forth Gospel) But I will read the book again and again. I will even read the Book of John with renewed interest occasionally.

So I write this with a heavy heart. Filling in for Bishop Spong has not been an easy assignment. I sincerely wish I was reading something Jack wrote instead of the other way around. But I also write this with a warm heart, full of love and hope. Be well Jack.
~Fred C. Plumer
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Neil Fenham from England writes:

Question:
"What is a miracle? Do you believe in miracles?"
Answer:
Dear Neil,
It depends on how you define a miracle. I think my marriage to Christine is a miracle. How could I, just by chance, have met this incredible lady? I think parenthood is a miracle. There is no way I could have produced children like the ones who call me their father. I believe that friendship is a miracle. I know people who have enriched my life dramatically. In that sense I believe that life is full of miracles.
But that is not what most people mean when they ask that question. What they normally mean is 'Does God set aside the laws of the universe to intervene in life in supernatural ways?' There was a time when our ancestors in faith were quite sure that God did. But when those ideas were prevalent, people understood very little about how the world operated.
In a world where sickness was viewed as the punishment of God, the kind of cures we produce today from antibiotics, surgery or chemotherapy would be called miracles. In a world where people believed that the weather was the instrument of divine wrath, a hurricane that turned out into the ocean and away from land would be called a miracle. That, however, is not the kind of world we inhabit.
If religious people believe that God can miraculously intervene in history to cure cancer, to stop war or to redirect a storm, they have to tell me why God doesn't do it regularly. No Neil, the people who make these claims have simply not embraced either the complexity of the world or the mystery of God.
That is not all that can be said about miracles, but it is a start. I invite you to walk down this path and to see where it leads. God can no more be boxed into our world view than God could be boxed into the world view of our ancestors who saw miracle and magic everywhere. It is our task to walk into the mystery of God, not to fit God into our existence.
~John Shelby Spong

Read and Share Online Here

Announcements

“Spong is always readable and informative, but this book reads like a cross between a detective story and an adventure saga that is founded on excellent scholarship. I could not put it down.” — Fred C. Plumer, President of ProgressiveChristianity.Org

Click Here to Purchase Book 
For those who would like to send Bishop Spong a get well note please sent it to admin at progressivechristianity.org and we will forward it to Bishop Spong.

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